Alice Steps Through The Looking Glass and Encounters The Kybalion
Whimsy and Wisdom: Discovering the Hermetic Principles in Looking Glass Land
Wandering around my favourite charity (thrift) shop a few months ago, I found a lovely hardback copy of Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There (Lewis Carroll 1872). It wasn’t an old one by any means but published in the 1990s. I hadn’t read Alice in decades and I bought it with some idea that I might read it to my grandkids. I left it by my bed so I could dip into it when insomnia stalks.
And, it was one of those nights when sleep buggered off as soon as my head hit the pillow, that I sat up and reached for Alice. But I’d picked up two books. And when I saw what the other book was, I had an idea.
The Kybalion is a slim volume which summarises the ancient Hermetic Principles. It was ostensibly written by the anonymous authors, ‘The Three Initiates’ but is generally thought to be the work of one William Walker Atkinson, a prominent ‘New Thought’ author. It was published in 1908, some 36 years after Alice climbed onto the mantelpiece and disappeared, head over tip, into a parallel world.
So I began to read Through the Looking Glass with the seven principles of The Kybalion in my mind. As I read, I looked for clues that Lewis Carroll knew the Principles of Hermeticism…
